The fundamental problem is that in our fully networked era software cannot _not_ be maintained. Security issues are inevitable, cloud/sync/store systems require servers, upstream APIs, libraries & operating systems are constantly shifting and breaking things.
So OSS aside (which has its own complicated economics) someone needs an ongoing revenue stream for that work to happen. Whether it's through regular release of paid upgrades (and EOL of old ones) or a subscription model is these days less of a fundamental separation and more of a question of cadence.
Take a look at the much-vaunted Campfire from once.com - there's been zero new features since initial release and I'll bet the cost of a copy come Feb next year when it's a year old there'll be a 2.0 for another $300. How long after that will 1.0 be EOL'd? So are you really 'buying once' for $300 or paying $300 a year just with the auto-renew turned off?
Sure they can. If you pay 100-1200x more for your cloud services than you need, maybe not. And I guess that is a theme, if you have subscriptions you don't really need to care about expenses because you have a steady income. Absurd? Yes, but that is how our industry behaves. I'm appalled at what people are paying for the cloud that literally could be served from a raspberry pi. Yes, you need redundancy etc. and that takes time and thought. But have you ever factored in the time and expertise required to manage the cloud? It is incomprehensible.
So, how many subscriptions do you need to be able to maintain your software? Is 10 enough? No? Conclusion, subscriptions are not sustainable?
Similarly, how many purchases do you need to recoup the initial development? You will hardly break even after the first 10 sales. But once you do break even every single purchase goes 100% to maintenance and new features. That is a very good position to be in.
Of course it matters what kind of product you have and how big of an audience you can get. If it is very niche product and you only expect 100 sales then maybe a one off payment isn't particularly appealing. But then again, maybe the value lies in support instead. Or, of course, a subscription.
Paying for upgrades is also fine! But without shafting your current users. Compute is dirt cheap. If you sell someone a piece of software for $300 you can afford 20 cents per year for cloud costs to maintain your relationships.
One of the problems of no-one being liable for security, is that no-one has the incentive to thoroughly separate software you really need to trust, and that you care whether it's vulnerable to hacking, from that which you don't. "everything needs a revenue for security reasons" would make sense if companies were giving an effective security guarantee and investing in fulfilling it, which they aren't. If software liability existed, most providers would recuse themselves from the most security sensitive features and we'd have a few big providers doing stuff like syncing, handling long term data storage, sandboxing, etc. rather like now with credit card data. At which point a lot of software becomes unimportant to update.
Agree. However the core problem with most SAAS products is: the companies are beeing greedy and the products fail to deliver enough value or keeep missing a certain quality bar to make you happy.
You could easily fix that by a base price and a maintenence fee (per year, since
first buy) which would make it easy to opt in/out of a subscription model. The fact that companies are beeing greedy and fail to deliver prevents this from happening.
Jetbrains is the perfect example of a subscription based platform that I will happily pay for without any bad feelings. I pay yearly, after a few years you do get a discount (so I am a happy camper). And if at any point I decide I don't want to pay it anymore, I keep access to the latest version of the software I paid for.
Speaking as a SaaS company here: I get what you’re saying, but this isn’t really fair. We have ongoing development so sustain, financial planning to do, and investors down our necks. It’s hard to justify a business plan with lots of fluctuations and uncertainty, when we could also have a SaaS model instead.
The campfire model specifically is even worse; it becomes a liability to maintain that I can’t request of the vendor, but have to take care of myself. The burden of actively looking for vulnerabilities, and fixing them, is on me.
The idea may be venerable, but I don’t quite understand who would think you could consider a networked online chat server as finished…
> who would think you could consider a networked online chat server as finished…
What about a phone service? What about cable? WAN? Recent "smart" insanity notwithstanding, those things are not updated on end-user side; every now and then, some hardware or wiring might get replaced, but the infrastructure part on the customer side is generally one-and-done, and customers pay only for the actual telecommunication service.
Yes. That is why I want a Hardware Product with Software Model like iPhone. I want my NAS / HomeServer with all the OS and Software included. With Security update for at least 8 years. ( Synology is the closest thing we have got )
Apple could have done this, but they were so focused on their Services Revenue they want everyone to subscribe to their iCloud. They could have allow the NAS / HomeServer to backup to their cloud.
I think the subscription model needs to be refined.
500$/year (invented amount) for a Photoshop subscription that I’ll use 3 times in a year? But when I want it, I need photoshop, not $SOMETHINGELSE. Sell me a $5/day license and I’ll be happy to pay every time.
Subscription model is ok for heavily used software, but doesn’t properly address whatever I use every now and then.
There are also SaaS products with usage based pricing. It depends on what SaaS or software or product it is. Different pricing model works for different things.
Fully agree. I am a software developer myself. I can't imagine making a living by charging my customers just once, ever. It just doesn't make any business sense.
Software needs to be maintained and developed, and just following the evolving technology (operating systems, libraries, environments) is a lot of work. On top of that, you need to fix bugs, provide support, and yes, develop new features. This is not feasible with a one-time purchase.
For some reason many people like to play a game of pretending. The person buying pretends that it's a one-time purchase. The person selling pretends that it's a one-time payment. But then it turns out that a new version comes out every two years or so and you need to upgrade, so you end up paying. It's a subscription, but everybody pretends it isn't.
For the software I use and rely on, I would much rather see a subscription model, which is sustainable.
It is not a subscription though. You are not hostage. You don't have to upgrade. You can keep using the old version if it serves your needs.
Imagine your stance as a customer instead. Imagine being hostage to every single piece of software, completely at the whim of another business that can increase the prices and/or pivot away from your needs. You have to keep paying regardless of whether you want or need any of the features being introduced. Does it make business sense to allow for that risk?
Both models work and it is getting tiresome to pretend that anything but a subscription model isn't sustainable. Yes, everyone gets the appeal of subscriptions from the perspective of selling software. But it is pretty disingenuous to not acknowledge the other side or pretend that the other doesn't work. You can't be that lazy with anything in life.
> So OSS aside (which has its own complicated economics)
Assuming you're actually referring to free software and not open source software, it really doesn't, though. It's straight up better in every way than service-oriented software and commercial software in every way... except actually compensating developers. I'd work for a pittance writing free software if there were any institutional support for it. But who wants to kill the golden goose, even if it means our lives would all be greatly improved?
That's not "complicated", this is the opportunity to make a shit ton of money by charging people for software despite insignificant marginal costs. Even if it means humanity writes the same goddamn software over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, mostly shittier than the last iteration.
Many SaaS disappoint after a while. They suggest you are paying monthly and benefit from ongoing development in return. Instead prices get increased, and essential new features are locked behind additional pricing tiers. Premium, professional, enterprise, what’s next? The user interface becomes an advertising app for the upsell. It’s an abuse of trust. So the problem is not so much subscriptions and SaaS themselves, but the business practices they enable.
I already made one-time payments (aka "lifetime") for two softwares/services. Was great until the providers went out of business. Before that they treated me not so well in support. But, what should I do, end the contract?
Now I have the strict rule for myself not to use any kind of one-time payment options in this area (software/software based services) anymore.
I'm just putting this down here to shed light on the possible downsides.
Edit: now I realize this is not written clear enough. This rule applies to software/software based services I intend to use regularly to solve a specific problem, like office, storage, etc.
It's not a "lifetime" payment unless you can run it off-line. If the software needs to talk to vendor licensing/authentication services, then any "lifetime" license is a lie for the reasons you mention.
Lifetime payment literally means the specific software is yours and runs even after the business selling it goes out of business one day or is acquired by another business.
We need to consider these issues before selecting pay once option.
Ok, but think what would happen if you made a subscription and the provider went bankruptcy. Or was acquired by someone who shuts down the service? You would have payed for something that all of a sudden disappears and you have nothing, not even an old unsupported version fir the time you need to find alternatives.
Opened a website.
Already got `Welcome to our website!` modal that block the content.
Through the modal's overlay can see the banner `Your product could be here`.
Well, that is annoying. Thank you so much, I would rather use anything that is less intrusive.
I find my tolerance for subscription software is proportional to how often I use it. A tool I use daily as my core work, no problem - I want to support them to ensure they stick around. But occasional tools I’d prefer to buy upgrades only if there are new feature I care about.
I’m not a creative, so I’m not paying Adobe subscription (they’re icky in so many ways). But if I were I’d have no issue.
But there is a 3rd category - something like an editor I couldn’t bear if it was tied to a company to ensure it’s survival so that’s got to be open source - even though ironically I’m willing to pay more in that scenario.
I'd say there is a fourth category too - things that would be perfectly fine as a simple, local program purchased once that grow over-complicated cloud features to justify a subscription model.
Examples of this would be Lens, Postman and now Insomnia. This sort of behaviour is why I use k9s and Bruno instead.
100% agree with this. And I’d put most of the software into this category.
Also, let me offer you a different view on the software you use a lot and therefore want to support. The more a software/service is important to you, the more you should worry about having that as subscription, because it can go away in a matters of hours without you being able to do anything about that.
Think if slack went bankruptcy. Or if it was acquired by someone that shut it down. What would all those people that heavy relies on slack for their workflows? Or what about GitHub?
Can I propose a compromise? How about a yearly subscription with opt-in renewal. If you stop paying, you don’t get updates (or locked out in case it’s a service - not standalone software).
We all hate subscriptions but at the same time lifetime ownership puts you in a shitty place from a business development perspective. If the product has room to improve within its scope, I want the updates, the maintenance, select new features. If you one-time price that, the business incentives call for acquiring more users, not to make their existing ones happy.
The Jetbrain licensing model caused a lot or confusion when it was introduced (as can be seen in posts on their forum and reddit), and when I check now it still seems to be the same.
> as soon as you pay for 12 consecutive months, you will receive this perpetual fallback license providing you with access to the exact product version for when your 12 consecutive months subscription started.
So if you do not renew then in practice you might need to _downgrade_ to an earlier version when your subscription expires. But some of their software doesn't even support downgrade, so you need to uninstall/reinstall it and hope you have some old backup of your settings.
Looking at a lot of this stuff, "lifetime" is a bit misleading. It's for the life of the version. Buy v1.x and you can use v1.x forever, but if you want v2.x, pay again.
Of course, "forever" is only until everything around it leaves to the software not working, such as not supporting a new version of the OS it runs on.
> Buy v1.x and you can use v1.x forever, but if you want v2.x, pay again.
Yeah, but that has a few logistical and incentive challenges. Someone buying right before an update etc. And you may not want to create conflicts between semantic versioning and business decisions.
Another approach could be to have features labeled with
date, and gated behind flags. Then deliver updates to everyone but features are enabled based on your purchase date, eg within a year.
I can't keep the lights on with one time payments, period. I just don't make enough money.
However as a consumer I prefer them.
My compromise is a subscription that provides a permanent benefit after 1 year. Access to any version of the app released in your subscription period. Forever.
I think it's really fair, and when I made the change I saw an immediate uptick in sales.
That’s the model of Nova from Panic. Stop paying, and you stop getting updates after the moment your subscription lapses. That’s it. There’s no other complex system. It works great!
Oh nice, I also started a similar project about nine months ago - https://payonceapps.com/
It came from my personal experience, where I sold my app for a fair one-time price and decided to give similar-minded people some spotlight.
And according to libertarian thought, ownership is the basis of ethics. I'm a bit surprised there isn't more of a libertarian backlash against the "you will own nothing and be happy" trend in our culture.
I don't have this idea fully fleshed out yet, but I feel that the ownership vs. rent preference is like the difference between resource model in StarCraft vs. Total Annihilation (and their respective descendants).
In StarCraft, the focus is on your absolute account balance; you think in terms of having N units of minerals/gas, and spending them on things that cost particular amount of resources to make. In Total Annihilation, the focus is on resource flow - you try to balance how much metal/electricity per second your mines/generators supply, vs. how much metal/electricity per seconds your factories and defenses consume.
In my experience, the two approaches are ultimately the same - you could compute the resource flow for a StarCraft game, and you could pay attention to absolute amounts in Total Annihilation - but they yield entirely different game dynamics, and different player mindsets. Personally, my mind thinks more in StarCraft terms, but I imagine finance people think more in Total Annihilation terms, and in those, subscriptions are the natural mode of spending.
An analogy: /pol/ used to be a libertarian board, but once it watched Ron Paul receive two screwjobs and saw that the anti-libertarians are actually militant (even if only covertly), /pol/ realized a militant ideology is the only solution as a bunch of ragtag armed individualists are no match against an organized instrument.
Libertarianism will make its greatest advancements in creating software and systems which render groups redundant and/or impotent vs individuals. A homomorphically encrypting, opaque, Monero-like Etherium would threaten the neccessity of certain governmental functions and lock the government out from observing (like Bitcoin) and manipulating (with force) participants.
Uncensorable prediction markets, DAOs, the possibilities...
Readit News
So OSS aside (which has its own complicated economics) someone needs an ongoing revenue stream for that work to happen. Whether it's through regular release of paid upgrades (and EOL of old ones) or a subscription model is these days less of a fundamental separation and more of a question of cadence.
Take a look at the much-vaunted Campfire from once.com - there's been zero new features since initial release and I'll bet the cost of a copy come Feb next year when it's a year old there'll be a 2.0 for another $300. How long after that will 1.0 be EOL'd? So are you really 'buying once' for $300 or paying $300 a year just with the auto-renew turned off?
So, how many subscriptions do you need to be able to maintain your software? Is 10 enough? No? Conclusion, subscriptions are not sustainable?
Similarly, how many purchases do you need to recoup the initial development? You will hardly break even after the first 10 sales. But once you do break even every single purchase goes 100% to maintenance and new features. That is a very good position to be in.
Of course it matters what kind of product you have and how big of an audience you can get. If it is very niche product and you only expect 100 sales then maybe a one off payment isn't particularly appealing. But then again, maybe the value lies in support instead. Or, of course, a subscription.
Paying for upgrades is also fine! But without shafting your current users. Compute is dirt cheap. If you sell someone a piece of software for $300 you can afford 20 cents per year for cloud costs to maintain your relationships.
You could easily fix that by a base price and a maintenence fee (per year, since first buy) which would make it easy to opt in/out of a subscription model. The fact that companies are beeing greedy and fail to deliver prevents this from happening.
Personally, I’ve decide if I can’t buy something and just have it I will do without. So be it.
The idea may be venerable, but I don’t quite understand who would think you could consider a networked online chat server as finished…
What about a phone service? What about cable? WAN? Recent "smart" insanity notwithstanding, those things are not updated on end-user side; every now and then, some hardware or wiring might get replaced, but the infrastructure part on the customer side is generally one-and-done, and customers pay only for the actual telecommunication service.
It seems to work quite well for both my customers and my products.
Apple could have done this, but they were so focused on their Services Revenue they want everyone to subscribe to their iCloud. They could have allow the NAS / HomeServer to backup to their cloud.
500$/year (invented amount) for a Photoshop subscription that I’ll use 3 times in a year? But when I want it, I need photoshop, not $SOMETHINGELSE. Sell me a $5/day license and I’ll be happy to pay every time.
Subscription model is ok for heavily used software, but doesn’t properly address whatever I use every now and then.
Software needs to be maintained and developed, and just following the evolving technology (operating systems, libraries, environments) is a lot of work. On top of that, you need to fix bugs, provide support, and yes, develop new features. This is not feasible with a one-time purchase.
For some reason many people like to play a game of pretending. The person buying pretends that it's a one-time purchase. The person selling pretends that it's a one-time payment. But then it turns out that a new version comes out every two years or so and you need to upgrade, so you end up paying. It's a subscription, but everybody pretends it isn't.
For the software I use and rely on, I would much rather see a subscription model, which is sustainable.
Imagine your stance as a customer instead. Imagine being hostage to every single piece of software, completely at the whim of another business that can increase the prices and/or pivot away from your needs. You have to keep paying regardless of whether you want or need any of the features being introduced. Does it make business sense to allow for that risk?
Both models work and it is getting tiresome to pretend that anything but a subscription model isn't sustainable. Yes, everyone gets the appeal of subscriptions from the perspective of selling software. But it is pretty disingenuous to not acknowledge the other side or pretend that the other doesn't work. You can't be that lazy with anything in life.
Assuming you're actually referring to free software and not open source software, it really doesn't, though. It's straight up better in every way than service-oriented software and commercial software in every way... except actually compensating developers. I'd work for a pittance writing free software if there were any institutional support for it. But who wants to kill the golden goose, even if it means our lives would all be greatly improved?
That's not "complicated", this is the opportunity to make a shit ton of money by charging people for software despite insignificant marginal costs. Even if it means humanity writes the same goddamn software over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, mostly shittier than the last iteration.
Deleted Comment
Edit: now I realize this is not written clear enough. This rule applies to software/software based services I intend to use regularly to solve a specific problem, like office, storage, etc.
Lifetime payment literally means the specific software is yours and runs even after the business selling it goes out of business one day or is acquired by another business.
We need to consider these issues before selecting pay once option.
Deleted Comment
Well, that is annoying. Thank you so much, I would rather use anything that is less intrusive.
I’m not a creative, so I’m not paying Adobe subscription (they’re icky in so many ways). But if I were I’d have no issue.
But there is a 3rd category - something like an editor I couldn’t bear if it was tied to a company to ensure it’s survival so that’s got to be open source - even though ironically I’m willing to pay more in that scenario.
Examples of this would be Lens, Postman and now Insomnia. This sort of behaviour is why I use k9s and Bruno instead.
Also, let me offer you a different view on the software you use a lot and therefore want to support. The more a software/service is important to you, the more you should worry about having that as subscription, because it can go away in a matters of hours without you being able to do anything about that.
Think if slack went bankruptcy. Or if it was acquired by someone that shut it down. What would all those people that heavy relies on slack for their workflows? Or what about GitHub?
We all hate subscriptions but at the same time lifetime ownership puts you in a shitty place from a business development perspective. If the product has room to improve within its scope, I want the updates, the maintenance, select new features. If you one-time price that, the business incentives call for acquiring more users, not to make their existing ones happy.
> as soon as you pay for 12 consecutive months, you will receive this perpetual fallback license providing you with access to the exact product version for when your 12 consecutive months subscription started.
So if you do not renew then in practice you might need to _downgrade_ to an earlier version when your subscription expires. But some of their software doesn't even support downgrade, so you need to uninstall/reinstall it and hope you have some old backup of your settings.
Is this what you are referring to?
Of course, "forever" is only until everything around it leaves to the software not working, such as not supporting a new version of the OS it runs on.
Yeah, but that has a few logistical and incentive challenges. Someone buying right before an update etc. And you may not want to create conflicts between semantic versioning and business decisions.
Another approach could be to have features labeled with date, and gated behind flags. Then deliver updates to everyone but features are enabled based on your purchase date, eg within a year.
>Pay for a year and get a lifetime usage license.
Here's why I price like I do:
I can't keep the lights on with one time payments, period. I just don't make enough money.
However as a consumer I prefer them.
My compromise is a subscription that provides a permanent benefit after 1 year. Access to any version of the app released in your subscription period. Forever.
I think it's really fair, and when I made the change I saw an immediate uptick in sales.
Renewal is still opt out though. Defaults matter.
In StarCraft, the focus is on your absolute account balance; you think in terms of having N units of minerals/gas, and spending them on things that cost particular amount of resources to make. In Total Annihilation, the focus is on resource flow - you try to balance how much metal/electricity per second your mines/generators supply, vs. how much metal/electricity per seconds your factories and defenses consume.
In my experience, the two approaches are ultimately the same - you could compute the resource flow for a StarCraft game, and you could pay attention to absolute amounts in Total Annihilation - but they yield entirely different game dynamics, and different player mindsets. Personally, my mind thinks more in StarCraft terms, but I imagine finance people think more in Total Annihilation terms, and in those, subscriptions are the natural mode of spending.
Libertarianism will make its greatest advancements in creating software and systems which render groups redundant and/or impotent vs individuals. A homomorphically encrypting, opaque, Monero-like Etherium would threaten the neccessity of certain governmental functions and lock the government out from observing (like Bitcoin) and manipulating (with force) participants.
Uncensorable prediction markets, DAOs, the possibilities...